Existing research on the legitimacy of the UN Security Council is conceptual or theoretical, for the most part, as scholars tend to make legitimacy assessments with reference to objective standards. Whether UN member states perceive the Security Council as legitimate or illegitimate has yet to be investigated systematically; nor do we know whether states care primarily about the Council's compliance with its legal mandate, its procedures, or its effectiveness. To address this gap, our article analyzes evaluative statements made by states in UN General Assembly debates on the Security Council, for the period 1991–2009. In making such statements, states confer legitimacy on the Council or withhold legitimacy from it. We conclude the following: First, the Security Council suffers from a legitimacy deficit because negative evaluations of the Council by UN member states far outweigh positive ones. Nevertheless, the Council does not find itself in an intractable legitimacy crisis because it still enjoys a rudimentary degree of legitimacy. Second, the Council's legitimacy deficit results primarily from states' concerns regarding the body's procedural shortcomings. Misgivings as regards shortcomings in performance rank second. Whether or not the Council complies with its legal mandate has failed to attract much attention at all.

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The ability to violate and the duty to protect human rights have traditionally been ascribed to states. Yet, since international organizations increasingly take decisions that directly affect individuals, it has been alleged that they, too, have human rights obligations. Against this background, we can witness a trend among international organizations establishing provisions to prevent human rights violations and to enable individuals to hold them accountable for such violations. This can be seen as a specific manifestation of a more general trend that has been described as the spread of good governance standards to, or the constitutionalization of, international organizations. The purpose of this article is to reveal the mechanisms that can account for the introduction of human rights protection provisions in international organizations. The empirical basis of the article forms a case study on the evolution of such provisions in United Nations sanctions policy. I first develop a conceptual framework that draws on diffusion mechanisms that have been used to explain the spread of norms and institutional design among states and to trace reform processes in international organizations. The empirical analysis suggests that shaming, defiance, litigation and instances of learning can account for the advancement of human rights protection provisions in United Nations sanctions policy: the Security Council was exposed to and responded to various forms of pressure from a variety of different actors. At the same time, it was approached with arguments concerning why it should institute reforms and advice in terms of how such reforms should look and engaged in a learning process.

Human rights violations by international organisations (IOs) are a possible side effect of their growing authority. Recent examples are the cases of sexual exploitation by UN peacekeepers and violations caused by IMF austerity measures. In response, IOs increasingly develop safeguards to protect human rights from being violated through their policies to regain legitimacy. We argue that this development can be accounted for by a mechanism we call ‘authority-legitimation mechanism’. We test this theoretical expectation against ten case studies on UN and EU sanctions policies, UN and NATO peacekeeping and World Bank and IMF lending. Next, we demonstrate inductively that the authority-legitimation mechanism can evolve through different pathways, depending on which actors get engaged. We label these pathwayslegislative institution-buildingif parliaments in member states put pressure on their governments to campaign for human rights safeguards in IOs,judicial institution-buildingif courts demand human rights safeguards,like-minded institution-buildingif civil society organisations, middle powers and IO bodies with little formal power push for human rights safeguards, oranticipatory institution-buildingif IOs adopt such safeguards from other IOs without having violated human rights themselves. Finally, we argue that which of these pathways are activated and how effective they are depends on specific conditions.

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